Davison Art Center Receives Museums for America Grant

Wesleyan University’s Davison Art Center is the recipient of a Museums for America federal grant in the amount of $111,173, with a matching amount of $117,023.

“Millions of Americans visit museums each year,” said Institute of Museum and Library Services Director Susan H. Hildreth in a press release. “These federal investments will ultimately help museums deliver enhanced learning experiences, improve collections care, and address community needs.”

Wesleyan University’s Davison Art Center will perform high-quality, rapid digital photography of key parts of its collections, prepare those images for collection management and educational access, and place many of them online for public viewing and aggregation.

The project will create 4,000 to 5,000 digital images to support institutional stewardship of the collection, and provide access to visual documentation of a significant number of objects. The Davison Art Center’s collection of prints and photographs represent European and American artists from the 15th century onwards, and by adding these images to their website, the museum will be able to achieve their strategic goals.

The IMLS announced new grants for 211 museum projects totaling $25,576,662, through its highly competitive Museums for America and National Leadership Grants for Museums programs.

This brings total IMLS support for museum services in 2014 to $30,062,585 for 263 projects. Museums of all types benefit from this funding—art museums, science centers, aquariums, children’s museums, and history museums among them.

Museums and other organizations across the country will use these funds to support learning experiences, engage community members, make rich collections more accessible, and safeguard the nation’s cultural and scientific heritage represented by the collections, according to the IMLS.

Museums for America grants help museums address key needs or challenges, enabling them to provide better service to their communities. National Leadership Grants for Museums address critical needs of the museum field and have the potential to advance professional practice nationwide.

A list of recipients is available on the IMLS website. For information about IMLS museum grant programs, visit the IMLS website.

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Photo Credit: Davison Art Center